About the Role
Join a small, high-velocity founding team at a Y Combinator–backed AI startup building brand intelligence tooling at the intersection of AI research, product, and engineering. As a Founding Engineer – Full Stack, you'll help companies understand how large language models perceive and recommend them — and shape the product, systems, and engineering culture from the ground up. This is a rare opportunity to be one of the earliest engineers at a company defining an entirely new category of AI-powered software.
What You'll Do
- Own problems end-to-end — from high-level customer insight through research and all the way down to infrastructure.
- Maintain a close feedback loop with customers and the executive team; ship fast and iterate.
- Help shape and grow a new engineering team at the start of a new era of software development.
- Continuously reinvent best practices for building and collaborating alongside AI agents.
- Translate customer needs directly into product features with strong design and product instincts.
What We're Looking For
Required:
- 1+ years of experience on engineering teams (2+ preferred), including at least one stint of 18+ months in a strong engineering environment (startup or scale-up).
- Comfortable working full-stack — from customer-facing UI to backend services and cloud infrastructure.
- Proficient with React, Python, Terraform, and AWS.
- Experience building agentic systems or working with LLMs in production.
- Startup experience or compelling self-driven personal projects that demonstrate initiative.
- Strong product and design sense; ability to translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete features.
- Must be a US citizen or hold a valid US work visa (no sponsorship required for this criterion — authorized to work in the US).
Nice to Have:
- Direct experience working with customers (sales calls, discovery, feedback sessions).
- Eagerness to adopt AI-powered coding and development tooling.
- Background in scientific or AI research (e.g., interpretability, NLP, ML).
Compensation & Benefits
- Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience.
- Early-stage equity as a founding team member.
- Visa sponsorship available.
Location
This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. In-person collaboration with the founding team is expected.
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